1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cooking apparatus and a cooking method thereof, and, more particularly, to a cooking apparatus and a cooking method thereof capable of reading a bar code attached to a food package, thereby conveniently cooking the food.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, cooking apparatuses are devices that cook foods using various heating sources. The cooking apparatuses are classified into several types of cooking apparatuses. For example, a microwave oven is a cooking apparatus that cooks foods using microwaves. In the conventional microwave oven, a user directly inputs cooking time, cooking mode, and kinds of food to be cooked through the use of a key input unit formed at the front panel of the microwave oven: That is, in the conventional microwave oven it is necessary that the user manually input cooking information. Consequently, appropriate cooking conditions are not easily and conveniently set.
In order to solve the above-mentioned problem, a microwave oven having a bar-code reader has been developed that is capable of cooking foods based upon the cooking information read by the bar-code reader. Such a microwave oven is disclosed in Korean Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2001-0010530 and Korean Unexamined Patent Publication No. 1999-0074607.
The conventional microwave oven having the bar-code reader includes a cooking chamber disposed in an oven body, a built-in bar-code reader disposed at the front panel of the oven body or a charge-coupled display-type or pen-type bar-code reader that is connected to the oven body via a cable, a display unit which displays the operation of the microwave oven, an input unit including a plurality of input buttons, and a magnetron which generates microwaves to be supplied to the cooking chamber.
To perform a cooking process in the conventional microwave oven having the bar-code reader as described above, a user brings a bar code attached to a food package to the bar-code reader to read the bar code, and the microwave oven performs the cooking process on based upon the cooking condition stored in the read bar code.
In the conventional microwave oven having the bar-code reader, however, the cooking process is performed only based upon the cooking condition read from the bar code without consideration of the amount of food to be cooked. As a result, the food may be insufficiently or excessively cooked. For example, when a portion of a three-serving food package is cooked in the cooking chamber in accordance with cooking conditions stored in a bar code printed on the three-serving food package, which are set to cook the entire three-serving food package, the food is excessively cooked.
On the other hand, when the entire three-serving food package is cooked in the cooking chamber based upon a cooking condition stored in the bar code printed on the three-serving food package, which are set to cook a one-serving portion of the three-serving food package, the food is insufficiently cooked.